Extractive Geographies in Sponsored Media: Colombia’s Large-Scale Coal Mining in the 1980s

Abstract

This article examines corporate and institutional visual media surrounding the early years of the Cerrejón coal mine in Colombia. The analysis of a varied corpus of educational television, magazine photography, and a short film made by Exxon shows how an extractive enterprise sought to present its impacts as contained and justified. Images and narratives produced an illusion of geographical and temporal separation between the mine and the lifeworlds it impacted. While the material repeats well-known tropes of modernization and the technological sublime, it also works in specific ways within a context that produced sacrifice zones in Indigenous territories.